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Authoring the Future: a brief word on Invisible Differences

A brief unsolicited word on invisible differences, not directed at any specific person, because I am tired of seeing people wronged and harmed by stigmas wielded as sickles by those unhindered by such hardships:

Anyone who has ever read anything that I have written, or listened to me speak, knows that I am pretty fucking intensely passionate about the subject of individuation and differentiation, of identity and of experience and of agencies. Sometimes those differences are huge and visibly apparent, such as racial and cultural heritage, religious devotions, or apparent physical disability or impairment. (My oldest brother, for example, looks like Tom Cruise and parts his hair on the side and has never had so much as a five-o’clock shadow for how clean-cut and prim-proper he is. Nobody would ever believe we were related.) Some differences are less visible — personality differences, orientation or preference differences. Others are entirely invisible to the untrained eye.

Difference, to most people in any society alive today (and in many other times), eventually produces challenges; this is why “differences” is co-defined in the negative, e.g. “we must settle our differences”. Differences produce, amongst other things, stigmas.

Those with invisible differences — health differences, for example — often suffer the hardest in these. Those who have had strokes that don’t display, or brain injuries, or who must suffer with a mental illness or as a survivor of a great trauma. These differences do not always display. Sometimes, people who do not see these differences behave terribly to those who live with them, as if that person has selected to individually wrong or betray those of more statistically normative patterning, by virtue of being unlike them in some way.

Differences are not a betrayal. They are a confession of truth. Honor this trust — the trust implicitly and silently shown by ANYONE who permits their differences to be visible — or shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and stay the fuck out the way of those who are going to author this world’s future.

Because, to be blunt and direct?

You who have no respect for displayed truth and differentiated state and experience? You have no say in the future.